1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a communication service plan minute overdraft protection, and in particular, to methods for adding overdraft minutes to a “post-paying” customer account to avoid incurring high cost overage minutes.
2. Description of the Related Art
“Prepaid” wireless has been a major push in the Wireless world to attract customers who have no desire to be bound to a contract, or to those who do not have established credit and/or have poor credit. Prepaid wireless customers may purchase a predetermined number of minutes for use with their wireless telephone as the need arises. There are numerous advantages to entering into prepaid service contracts. For example, the carrier is guaranteed that the account will always remain current, and the pre-paying customer is guaranteed that she will not pay overage minutes because by paying beforehand, she can regulate usage and costs of the wireless account.
Today's post-paying customer does not enjoy those same advantages because traditionally, such features have not been available. Under existing post-paying service plan contracts, it is not possible to buy/add additional minutes beyond the allotted predetermined number of minutes prescribed by the service plan. The allotted number of minutes is typically preselected by the post-paying customer at the time the wireless account is activated. Consequently, when a post-paying customer has exhausted all of his or her minutes in the service plan, he or she may not be notified and therefore would automatically be charged additional minutes' at what typically is an increased per minute amount. As a result, a post-paying customer may receive a monthly statement in excess of what she anticipated and accounted for in her monthly budget.
Customarily, telephone service plan contracts are established in advance of use in one year increments. Various service plans can be selected by the user when a new user account is established. The user generally selects from among the various plans based on what the user anticipates his or her average minute usage will be for each month. When anticipating average monthly usage, most users do not consider extraordinary usage that may be incurred in any given month, such as, going on vacation or being away from home for extended periods of time.
Various service plans have attempted to solve the problem of causing subscriber's to be charged overage minutes, such as allowing a user to accumulate the unused portion of his minutes in any month, and have them rolled over onto the next month billing cycle, or any successive billing cycle thereafter. For example, CINGULAR WIRELESS ROLLOVER® calling plan allows a customer to roll over the unused minutes from one month to the following months billing cycle. Rolling over minutes is only helpful when the subscriber has an excess number of minutes accumulated from previous months. This solution however does not solve the problem faced by the subscriber when there are no accumulated rollover minutes available and she is about to be charged overage minutes once all of her available minutes have been used.
Thus, there is a need to provide methods to regulate overage minutes when a user determines beforehand that she will occasionally go beyond the allotted number of minutes set forth in the service plan contract in any given month.